Medical robotic systems such as those used in performing minimally invasive surgical procedures offer many benefits over traditional open surgery techniques, including less pain, shorter hospital stays, quicker return to normal activities, minimal scarring, reduced recovery time, and less injury to tissue. Consequently, demand for minimally invasive surgery using such medical robotic systems is strong and growing.
Examples of medical robotic systems include the da Vinci® Surgical System and the da Vinci®S™ Surgical System from Intuitive Surgical, Inc., of Sunnyvale, Calif. Each of these systems includes a surgeon's console, a patient-side cart, a high performance three-dimensional (“3-D”) vision system, and Intuitive Surgical's proprietary EndoWrist® articulating instruments, which are modeled after the human wrist so that when added to the motions of manipulators holding the surgical instruments, they allow at least six degrees of freedom of motion, which is comparable to or even greater than the natural motions of open surgery.
The da Vinci® surgeon's console has a high-resolution stereoscopic video display with two progressive scan cathode ray tubes (“CRTs”). The system offers higher fidelity than polarization, shutter eyeglass, or other techniques. Each eye views a separate CRT presenting the left or right eye perspective, through an objective lens and a series of mirrors. The surgeon sits comfortably and looks into this display throughout surgery, making it an ideal place for the surgeon to display and manipulate 3-D intraoperative imagery.
The patient-side cart typically includes three or more robotic arm assemblies with corresponding slave manipulators for holding and manipulating medical devices such as surgical instruments (or other tools) and image capturing devices for performing and/or viewing a medical procedure at a surgical site within a patient. To manipulate these medical devices, the surgeon's console also includes input devices which may be selectively associated with the medical devices and their respective slave manipulators. Since the movements of the input devices and their associated medical devices are scaled, this allows the surgeon to perform intricate medical procedures with greater ease than conventional open surgery as an operator of the medical robotic system. Further, it may even allow the surgeon to perform medical procedures that are not even feasible using conventional open surgery techniques.
To perform a minimally invasive surgical procedure on a patient, one or more incisions are first made in the patient and cannulae inserted therein to gain access to a surgical site within the patient. Setup arms supporting the slave manipulators are then positioned so as to allow the slave manipulators to attach to respective of the cannulae. Surgical instruments engaged on the slave manipulators are then inserted into the cannulae and properly positioned and oriented in order to perform the procedure. A surgeon may then manipulate input devices which are coupled to the slave manipulators and their respective surgical instruments through one or more controllers to perform the surgical procedure.
Numerous operational modes may be implemented in a medical robotic system and transitions between such operational modes may be governed by sophisticated state machines. When a user wants to effect a change of mode in the system, he or she may be required to perform one or more steps to satisfy the relevant mode-change criteria demanded by the state machine. When the criteria are purely discrete, they may be described simply with a static icon or dialog box message (e.g., “Press Fault Recover to Continue”). However, in some medical robotic systems, the mode-change criteria may require the user to manipulate one or more input devices continuously and in a certain fashion until the actions required to complete the mode change are successfully performed. In such systems, it may be difficult for the user to understand what he or she must do to effect the mode change if only a simple static icon or discrete message is provided—thus, making the system more difficult to use and harder to learn.